When Sir Keir Starmer sat down with Lauren Laverne to talk through his Desert Island Discs last month, the Labour Party held its breath. Would its leader flaunt phoney indie credentials, as David Cameron did in 2006? Surely it couldn’t be worse than Ed Miliband in 2013, his top choice of Robbie Williams’s Angels tickling the nation’s gag reflex.
‘For me, Huddersfield is about all sorts of music, but it’s not about the mainstream.’ Graham McKenzie, Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, is scrupulous in his pursuit of the obscure. Since its conception in 1978, the festival has hosted the full spectrum of musical experimentation, from acoustic reinterpretations of Kraftwerk tracks to a concert given entirely on half-cooked vegetables (the instruments were later served to the audience as soup).
Joan Tower is not a name you hear very often this side of the pond. The New York-based composer’s music has featured just once at the BBC Proms – her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1, conducted by its dedicatee, Marin Alsop, in 2012. A smattering of broadsheet reviews acknowledge Tower’s status as a ‘senior figure’ in the contemporary American scene but rarely do they unpack why that might be.
To the outside world, the conductor and organist Stephen Cleobury could come across as reserved, stoic – unassuming. But his singers knew better: ‘You have to be in partnership with him to see an entirely different world of emotions revealed,’ one of his young choristers told the journalist Richard Morrison. It was through music that Cleobury best expressed himself, and if his many recordings are anything to go by, he had a lot to say.
Cracks of thunder, road rage, intermittent sirens and a barking dog: the brave members of HGO faced stiff competition during last night’s performance of Sāvitri. And that was before it started to rain. Lucky, then, that the prospect of a living, breathing opera – experienced without the pallid glow of a computer screen – was too enticing for such trifles to matter.
By Jeffrey Arlo Brown, Timmy Fisher and Hartmut Welscher
Not long after the last global pandemic, in which some 50 million people died from Spanish flu, a social change began to take place in living rooms across the world. With the dawn of radio, and later television, the parlor gatherings and upright pianos that had once been the focus of evening entertainment were gradually phased out. A century later, with a new pandemic sweeping the globe, classical music has never felt more under threat …
Last week I was lucky enough to meet Errollyn Wallen, the Belize-born composer whose BBC Proms commission, This Frame is Part of the Painting, will be premiered next month at the Royal Albert Hall. We chatted about her career and the influence of artists like Howard Hodgkin on her work, before moving on to a more general discussion on the state of classical music today…
